Health and History

This article argues that during the four decades following World War II, New Zealand medical specialists worked within a professional field that was fundamentally international in nature. In contrast to the predominantly nation-centred narratives that characterise much of New Zealand's medical historiography, this article suggests that the structures, conventions, and values that underpinned the work of New Zealand specialists were to a large extent derived from, and sustained by, a complex network of international exchanges...

W. F. Theunissen (1882-1961) was a leading psychiatrist in the Dutch East Indies. He was the medical director of several large mental hospitals after which he became director of the Dutch East Indies Public Health Service. Theunissen was not known for his research into the causes of mental illness. Instead, he made his mark as an administrator greatly reducing the expenses of the Lawang mental hospital by expanding occupational therapy in new and innovative ways. His accomplishments earned him the position of director of the Indies Public Health Department, where he oversaw the decentralisation of health services and the development of public health initiatives...

Neurasthenia remains an important health problem in certain Asian populations, both in Asia as well as in a diasporic context. An anachronistic disease for Western observers, it has become an exotic culture-bound syndrome as well as a somatoform disorder too often hiding much more serious issues of depression. This article approaches this 'problematic' health issue from a historian's point of view and offers a colonial genealogy that will discuss neurasthenia's outline in French Vietnam. By retracing and analysing the different mentions, definitions, and uses of the term neurasthenia in the interwar period, it aims to better understand certain historical realities that might have shaped the local identity and spatiality of this problem (concentrated in colonial cities in which social change and modernity were expressed in their most salient forms), and perhaps even identify reasons that facilitated its post-colonial survival...

In the nineteenth century, place bore immediately and urgently on questions of imperialism, race, and health. This article considers European strategies to control local environments and improve healthiness through the exchange of people, plants, ideas and garden designs between India and Australia. Migration removed Europeans from unhealthy environments, either permanently (to Australia and elsewhere) or temporarily (to hill stations in India). Trees like the eucalyptus were introduced into India to enhance European health, based on belief they drained sources of disease...

This article examines how female immigrants were characterised inside the Yarra Bend Asylum in Melbourne, Victoria (Hospital for the Insane after 1905), once they slipped into the world of the institutionally 'hidden.' Forms of social difference inside colonial institutions for the insane were embedded in patient case records. This article argues that through a closer examination of cases of female immigrants, we might find out more about gender relations in colonial situations. In particular this article returns to ideas about women patients and constructions of these women through case records to uncover new interpretations of this material in the Australasian context...

This article addresses asylum patients 'expressions of Christian religious identity in New Zealand's only private asylum, Ashburn Hall, Dunedin, New Zealand, between 1882 and 1910. Religion remains an area that has been under-examined by historians of the asylum. A significant minority of patients admitted to Ashburn Hall turned to religion to interpret their surroundings, express their feelings, or assert their identity within the space of the asylum. For those allowed out of the asylum to attend their own denominational services, religion also opened up a community other than the forced community of the asylum...

Historians have focused on early twentieth-century positive eugenics in New Zealand In this article, I argue that the response came from a tradition of concern about heredity and white racial degeneracy, which extended beyond the British Empire. This article focuses on concerns about heredity at the Auckland Mental Hospital between 1850 and 1899, and contextualises these concerns in New Zealand mental hospital statistics from the late-nineteenth century. This article also considers Australasian, British, North and South American medical and immigration legislation history, and contrasts this with the legislation and medical discourses which formed part of a fear of heredity, racial degeneracy, immigration and mental illness in New Zealand...

This article argues for the blending of local, national, and transnational perspectives to explore comparative issues relating to asylum developments and provisions in New Zealand. It also aims to highlight some issues preoccupying authorities of the time and in doing so focuses on three key areas that generated comparative comment among medical officials in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: asylum provision and funding, statistics, and forms of committal. These areas were of concern due to claims that insane patients were deliberately being shipped to New Zealand: that the colony had high admission and recovery rates; and that asylums in the colony were overcrowded...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The oral testimony of forty men entering nursing (1950-2000) and twenty men entering midwifery (1970-2000) in Australia is littered with descriptions of gender discrimination. Men identify many of the barriers they encountered entering a female dominated profession. The Nurses' Registration Act in the States of Victoria (1958) and Tasmania (1952) explicitly stated no male could be registered as a midwife and this paper focuses on the personal accounts of three men (1974-1976) to change this legal impediment...

This article examines key aims, objectives, technologies, strategies, and procedures utilised in Australian methadone maintenance programs over the past thirty years. An examination of the major policy documents reveal that, in addition to medico-health concerns, methadone programs have been strategically deployed to manage specific sociopolitical problems including illicit drug use, crime, and the spread of infectious diseases. The techniques, technologies, and procedures utilised in methadone programs and the 'disciplinary monotony 'of the methadone regime itself aim to produce a more compliant, conforming, and self-regulating subject...

The expectation of participation in cervical screening programs has become a ubiquitous feature of women's lives; but despite the obvious importance of trying to prevent cervical cancer, both the expression and fulfilment of that expectation are far from straightforward. This is because the actors involved are not always consistent in their interpretation of the risks involved and safety sought. The history of cervical screening in Australia illustrates how the implementation of medical surveillance can be shaped by such interpretations...

In the late 1940s, small groups of 'interested parents' and 'concerned citizens' began to gather in community halls, hoping to assuage the 'plight' of their intellectually disabled offspring. These meetings led to the formation of an association dedicated to the foundation of schools, day centres, or hostels for their children. By the 1960s, at least one of these groups existed in every Australian state. Together, they established several hundred schools, farm colonies, hostels, and workshops, and successfully lobbied state and federal governments to fund their ventures...

From 1911 to 1969 those people diagnosed with leprosy in the South Pacific were gradually isolated and received medical treatment at the Central Lepers' Hospital, Makogai Island, Fiji. Until the discovery of sulfones in the 1940s leprosy was largely incurable and it was expected that those who went to the island would never return. This paper assumes that the stigma attendant on leprosy which provoked the isolation order is itself a form of disability. The paper draws on patients'stories to explore their individual and collective experience of isolation and suggests that for many, collective isolation on Makogai was an enabling experience...

At the turn of the twentieth century, social attitudes toward disability turned sharply negative. An international eugenics movement brought about restrictive immigration laws in the United States and other immigrant nations. One cause was the changing understanding of time, both historical and quotidian, that accompanied the advent of evolutionary theory and a competitive industrial economy. As analogies of competition became culturally ubiquitous, new words to talk about disability such as 'handicapped', 'retarded', 'abnormal', 'degenerate', and 'defective', came into everyday use, all of them explicitly or implicitly rooted in new ways of thinking about time...

The 1920s in the United States are commonly remembered as the Jazz Age. Although historians have focused on the African American origins of the music, another theme was also prominent in the public discourse surrounding jazz: disability. Critics saw jazz and its associated dances as defective, causing both mental and physical impairments in their devotees. In other words, jazz music and dance were disabled and disabling. Proponents of jazz responded in kind, asserting that jazz did not cause impairments, it cured them; similarly, jazz was not defective music or dance, but a revitalisation of the art forms...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The Endocrine Society of Australia was formed in 1958 with the aims of advancing knowledge and practice in endocrinology (the study of hormones) and to bring together physicians and scientists in this area of study. It was one of the first medical specialist societies in Australia. From humble beginnings with ninety-nine foundation members, it has flourished to a society with almost 950 members which annually runs three successful clinical and scientific meetings, and provides scholarships, research grants, and travel grants for its young members...

Ten of the initial post-1975 appointees to chairs of public health and/or general practice in Australian and New Zealand universities had significant experience in Papua New Guinea. They had held often combined positions that covered academic, clinical, public health, and research arenas, most being retained when they returned to Australia and New Zealand. Their experiences in the former Territory of Papua and New Guinea, now known as Papua New Guinea, are reviewed here, and how each translated that experience in the development of departments in Australian medical schools after 1975 is identified...

The establishment in 1903 of a professional district nursing service in Wellington, New Zealand's capital city, was a philanthropic response to the need for skilled care for the sickpoor in their own homes, as hospital and charitable aid boards believed chronic patients drained their resources. This paper argues that it was the timely combination of the individual philanthropy of Sarah Ann Rhodes, the organisational philanthropy of the St John Ambulance Association and the new professional standing and availability of registered nurses such as Annie Holgate that ensured its successful foundation...